Adobe Pushes Emergency Flash Player Security Fix

As expected, Adobe today released a security update for its Flash Player. The out of cycle update addresses critical security issues in flash player as well as an important universal cross-site scripting issue.

The critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Flash Player 10.3.183.7 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris, and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.186.6 and earlier versions for Android. These vulnerabilities could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Adobe reported that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2011-2444) is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message.

Adobe’s Severity Rating System classifies “Critical” security issues as “a vulnerability, which, if exploited would allow malicious native-code to execute, potentially without a user being aware.”

With hackers capitalizing on newly discovered vulnerabilities faster than ever, it’s important for vendors to respond with fixes as soon as possible, and for end users and administrators to install the patches immediately.

To illustrate the importance of keeping systems up to date, including Adobe Flash products, the fact that the RSA cyber attack was executed using a spear phishing attack with an embedded flash file should serve as a friendly reminder. RSA was breached after an employee opened a spreadsheet that contained a zero-day exploit that installed a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability.

Just last week in a rare move, Oracle broke its normal procedures and issued an emergency patch due to concerns about the impact of a successful attack.